Saturday, April 20, 2013

I cleaned the fridge today, and wiped it with vanilla. There are blowsy double daffodils on the table. New sheets on the bed, the extra quilt folded on the top of the wardrobe because it has been on the floor three nights in a row. The variegated maple is neatly tipped with fat buds, cracked neon yellow here and there showing a tight cluster of tiny blooms like so many sun-bright throats crying allergenic anthems to the sky. I don't remember the tree flowering last year, but it must have done. So many things must have happened.

I have a story that I tell about myself, a story like a cup of coffee for every day there is. A story that begins and writes itself like magic or the government all the way into the future and everywhere into the past. Some days it might be a true story. Some days I know it is not a true story and I cry with the frustration of all the goddamn history following me around like plastic ziplocs marked EVIDENCE which fuck with the story, making it a story that has to be about change or redemption or discovery or some shit. The stories I tell are fetishistically univocal; stories about consistency and doggedness and singular drive and cleanly defined loves like the edges of glass or new paper.

I am not like this.

But today I am the girl who has always been the girl who wipes her fridge with vanilla.

I read a New Yorker profile a couple of years ago about this tech artist who built painfully meta pieces out of bits of trashed Segas and 80s motherboards and whatnot. I don't remember anything about it except the accompanying smug ersatz-metal arms-crossed photograph that probably wasn't his fault, and the fact that he'd written some code which searched the web and generated a realtime feed of all the blogposts apologising for not writing on their blogs more often.